Slashdot Mirror
Turn Your PC into a 'Moblogger'
ptorrone writes "Engadget's weekly how-to article this week shows how to turn a PC in to an 'automatic moblogging' machine. Their example they show a Windows PC, what do you use on your Mac or Linux machines to post images automatically?"
"as well as the house cat and dog, or as I refer to them, the meat pets."...remind me not to go to a BBQ at his place.
a freakin webcam? hello 1995?
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
Worst. Word. Ever.
Seriously, I think there is too much stuff put on the web just because people can. Blogs are mostly narcissistic rantings, with no regard to what purpose they serve. I'm getting tired of googling for something, only to turn up a useless blog or forum discussion.
Pay no attention to the laptop behind the curtain.
A Moblog is usually a website which displays photos you send photos from your camera phone, but you can use the same site to automatically send and post photos on the web
No Sig for you.!
According to the UrbanDictionary, a moblog is a "Moble Photo Weblog, a weblog made up of content (mainly pictures). Usually this content is published using a moble cellular phone that includes a digital camera."
This might have been more obvious if you had RTFA.
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Isn't this exactly what the 40,000,000 odd porn sites on the web have been doing for the last, um, decade or so?
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Ah, yes, thanks to technology he doesn't have to wait to get home to watch the cat toss up a hairball while the dog licks itself.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
And it is so secure!
If I were doing something like this, I would probably use Perl.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
In the old days of webcamming I used Inetcam software. Does/did everything the article talks about
Mob logging? Is that when your site gets slashdotted and apache is writing to the log files as fast as it can?
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
what do you use on your Mac or Linux machines to post images automatically?
cron
scp
"I like to look in on what the many robots are doing as well as the house cat and dog, or as I refer to them, the meat pets."
Dear god, this carbon based bi-ped has meat pets!
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Much like the words "Gen-X," "extreme," "controversial," the "i-" and "my-" prefixes and everything else that has been marketed, hyped, and "Next on Entertainment Tonight!"-ed to death, the "-blog" suffix has now joined the ranks of things that instantaneously bring out my "HULK SMASH!" reflex and, unfortunately for much of the world, I was exposed to a massive dose of radiation last night. I'll likely just wither away and die, but on the off-chance that I wake up tomorrow with a set of X-Men-esque abilities, the guy who coined "Right Guard Extreme!" just might want to start digging a hole to hide in.
Cliches of the world, fear my wrath.
it is written in Perl.
How about cron?
... you have to somehow find some way of 'copying' (or so i've been told) the output files into some sort of 'directory'
...
I did something like this many many years ago.
steps involved:
1. steal a webcam (no, i'm not paying anything over 5$ for a crappy 320x240 (or whatever) CMOS sensor.
2. get a v4l frame grabber
3. here's where it gets interesting, and kinda tricky
4. then you run your choice of automatic gallery-generating script, and WHAMO, you're on the bleeding edge of WWW acronymia and coolness.
really, being an techno-elitist aside, you can automate the entire process using cron and something like scp, rsh, or rsync (preferably some combination of those)
this is ollllllllllld news, incidentally. Seems to be the general tecnological ennui that's been affecting Askslashdot and other forums lately. Why go to all the trouble of using a search engine for locating information, when you can just fire off a post and wait a day or two for someone to write a recipe for you.
Incidentally, to quote the article
Basically, the way it works is as follows: you send any email with a picture attached to your TextAmerica account, the email address is the login/password so it looks like this login.password@tamw.com.
DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!
That has got to be the stupidest solution to this problem that I have ever heard.
.If you have a Sony Aibo, you can use the built in application which sends a photo email to also send a photo to the Moblog, I have 2 of my Aibos doing that now
Does it strike anyone else as odd that not only can he afford to throw away cash on something like an Aibo, but he can justify doing so more than 2 times?
Imagine a cluster of Aibo (sorry)
Isn't it?
My webcam (currently pointed at robin from a few inches away) uses a neat little freeware app called Cam2Web. Very barebones, it simply accepts a connection and then returns image data. Nice thing is how it uses HTTP 1.1 push to send up the images, which lets me avoid FTP and all that. I use another program to download an image every five minutes and save it for the archive. It all runs on a laptop with Win98.
I'd use a few simple shell scripts if my webcam actually worked in Linux. Oh well...it's an old cam, and Logitech never released any data.
...
I sure hope moblogging becomes much more widespread than it is now! If there's one thing the world needs, it's millions of pictures that capture inane and random figments of some stranger's life. Whoa, look at this whimsical picture that she look of the sunlight glistening off the back fender of her Taurus.... instant art!
In fact, I look forward to living vicariously through the lives of strangers and acquaintances. Why, it's almost as if I had a life of my own!
this whole moblog thing sounds like a reinvention of the wheel as far as webcams go.. nothing really new.. I used to have a webcam set up in my bedroom to keep an eye out for my siblings/parents. This was years ago..
I am guessing the great majority of people with accounts at Textamerica never read the Terms of Service and don't know that they don't own the images and text they posted to their own blogs there any more...
Quotes from their ToS:
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Moblogging?
Hmmmmmmm.....
4.27.04 Tony Z, Little Pasta, and I went down to Bruno's for a slice at noon. Talked bout sum bizness that needed to be handled with the Skarpaze family. Bastards owe us points from the game.
4.28.04 Little Pasta and Tony Z were arguing over "shotgun" in my caddy. Whacked em both cause I was getting irked. Buried em in Ma's rose garden. Got another slice at Bruno's.
Why is the GPL "anti-capitalist"? It provides corporations with high-quality software that they can use without paying license fees. And furthermore, it requires that any modifications to the software must be released to the general public, which would benefits all users of the software, corporations included.
Also, it encourages competition by preventing malicious companies from pulling an "embrace and extend" maneuver on an existing piece of software. I think it's far more anti-capitalist when a company does what ever possible to lock users into their proprietary product, deflecting the attempts of others to release competing products. Eliminating the competition is not the same as competition.
If you release software you've written yourself under the GPL, you are not some pinko anticapitalist commie. It is your right as a participant in a capitalist job economy to name your own terms under which you do work, whether it be $140/hr or for free (possibly with the GPL as the sole string attached). Remember, communism is where people are FORCED to work for the benefit of the greater whole. In the FOSS, people VOLUNTEER to work for the benefit of the greater whole. It's capitalistic because the developers have the ability to choose whether or not they want to volunteer or demand pay when they write software.
And no, the GPL does not FORCE people to give away their source code- if you don't want to give up your source code, don't modify GPL'd software. It's not like you'd even have the opportunity to modify the software if it was released under a proprietary or "shared source" license, so don't complain.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
I set up a similar setup for my fiancee so that she could see me at work and get a smile by getting to see my picture. (she lives in another state and we don't get to see each other that often) The utility that I use is a fantastic open source tool called Dorgem.
It has text overlays, transparent graphic overlays, motion detection, automatic capture, ftp upload, and most text fields can use replacements like %dd, %hh, %mm, etc etc etc to insert the date, the time, or various other things. You can even read from a file and have it overlay the title of the current song playing in Winamp.
I didn't notice any features in their screen captures of TinCam that weren't filled in Dorgem.
Cheers!
--Clint
A rough translation of "moblog" is "waste of time".
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Hi,
I just can't stand the cruft sprint makes your friends sift through to get picture mail.
For Sprint phones, I have maintained a screen scraper sort of tool, that intercepts "shared image" emails as you send them, cuts out the spint ads and junk HTML redirection, and sends it on its way as a plain old attachment.
This can easily be interfaced to blogging sites like text america -- they know how to look inside e-mails for attachments, but that's about this.
More details at: http://pcs.hoho.com
(PS: its free, and the Python source is available.)
cheers..
I set up my co-located web/mail server to support moblogging in a few hours. I was running procmail anyway, so it just involved adding a new recipe for email messages coming from my mobile phone. They get handed to a perl script that extracts any pictures and text using MIME::Parser. It then creates unique file names for any images, the HTML for the blog entry and inserts it into a postgresql table along with the date. My personal home page lists the table entries in reverse date order in order to generate the blog.